Читать книгу The House of Cariboo and Other Tales from Arcadia - A. Paul Gardiner - Страница 8

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Barbara and Dan at Home.

After wishing Godspeed to her venturesome husband, Barbara, with Andy’s Dan, was returning to their little homestead. Barbara sat upright in the wagon, now and then glancing backward over her shoulder toward the railroad station they had just left behind. This act she quickly excused by an attempt to arrange the shawl which she held tightly clasped about her. No tears were in her eyes when she bade farewell to her husband. Believing it to be her wifely duty to sustain him in the extraordinary undertaking he was engaging in, she had strengthened her courage to meet the final parting. From the neighbors’ gossip she had come to understand that the chances were many that he might never return to her alive, and she had said to him: “Do not stay to starve in the mountains. Come away home, mun; there is nae place better than Glengarry to dee in.” And he promised her to return.

Andy’s Dan, faithful in his simple devotion to his brother, had understood only in a vague sort of way the cause for his leaving home and the reasons which made it necessary to sell the stock of the farm, which for years he had loved as his only companions. They were gone, taken from him, and so was his brother and protector. For weeks after Andy’s departure he would be seen each evening at sunset, leaning over the pair of horse bars at the back of the house, gazing absently toward the western horizon. In that silence, too sacred to be disturbed, the expression upon his soulful face answered all questions of the curious.

Time wore slowly along at the farm on the “Nole.” Barbara each day went industriously about her housework, and just as if her husband had been home and the care of the dairy was still necessary, she washed and rubbed to a polish the milk pans, and stood them on edge upon the bench at the side of the woodshed, to glisten in the sun. At evening time, Andy’s Dan would regularly take from its hiding-place on the sill under the slanting roof of the milkshed the crooked staff, and whistling for his faithful collie dog, go down the lane to the pasture, calling to the imaginary herd of cattle feeding upon the sloping hills, then sadly return with the one lone cow reserved by Andy for the faithful watchers left at home. The Summer advanced, and he mowed the grass and weeds from the dooryards and dug down to the roots of the pesky burdocks growing about the fences which inclosed the unused farmyards. Then as Autumn approached, poor Andy’s Dan silently awaited the return of his beloved brother to commence again at harvest time the duties of the husbandman.